For more than a decade, a war and some time ago, before I was over seventeen, my friend and I, who taught me shaving, used to go to a desolate area five kilometers away from the village, for two reasons only: to smoke in secret and to scream.
We would finish part of our school duties, then meet in the afternoon, listen to the music, drink the dead, and talk, and then ask sadness: Why is all our things gathered in our chests? The more we fail to answer, the more we start with his orange motorbike eastward.
We walk a dirt path between the fields. If we see anyone on our way, he will be a shepherd riding his donkey back with his sheep from the pastures, walking towards the village, wanting to arrive before sunset.
We stop the bike on a plateau under which red plains grow, where silence and short grass grow. We sit on a high rock, light two cigars. We smoke. We are silent. We watch the tranquility as it runs ahead of us on the steppe, with grace and splendor!
In a flashy, mysterious moment, I look at him. Looking at. Then look together towards the horizon, and begin to scream.
As soon as we open our mouths until our voices draw all our distress and throw it away, it slowly disappears into the empty wilderness. Then we feel that we are filled with emptiness, that kind of vacuum that no one else can afford to endure. We then go back to the village, and we sing over the bike, which strenuously maneuvers the stones of the road.
After the days separated us in a direction, the war began, there is no longer a place to shout, as this region has become another front of the fighting, and the inhabited areas became the nest of death and destruction, and the shouting will increase the level of panic makes you a hero of a strange story will not leave Sanna will not blame her. Because I do not have such ambition, I have not dared to shout since then.
However, when I am on the street sometimes, I take over that mysterious moment. I open my mouth, but I mute the sound so that people around me do not throw the ground, thinking that a shell will fall between them, or that someone wants to blow himself up. I have refused to shout since the war broke out. How can I scream and cry? I have been unable to do so since the summer of 2011?
My friend no longer rejoices and does not grieve. My friend, with whom I passed through the tenth grade eight kilometers in forty minutes, was no longer running. No longer crying. No longer laughing. My friend killed him with a bullet from one who paved the way for all this ruin.
So I will not scream without him. I will not cry, if all the sorrows of the world are stored in my heart, or I will be dragged with a rope that extends to my neck all the destroyed neighborhoods and all the tales of oppression and all the memories. I have decided to stay silent, even if I stay to the end of my life, I will drink from the mothers' tears.
Today, I do not need to stretch my head so much to look inside myself to find tons of rubble and nonsense waiting to be emptied with one cry; I remember that I lost a friend screaming forever; and that I still avoid meeting his mother; and to realize that this country when it closed its eyelids closed with His eyes are all the places of screaming; his eyes that tell this country: Your children do not want anything from you ... just a place to shout.
